Blogs / Science Not Fiction

On this day in 1951, Univac 1, the world’s first commercial computer was delivered to the United States Census Bureau. Until the microcomputer revolution in the 1980s, the Univac 1 provided the archetype for the general public’s idea of what a computer looked like—big, brooding, complicated, and covered in countless flashing lights. Later generations of hackers called these lights “blinkenlights.” Blinkenlights once came in handy, by letting engineers see the state of various subsystems as the computer worked in real time–and letting visitors know that here was a big powerful computer.

Blinkenlights have turned up in countless movies, lurking in the lairs of James Bond villains, or heralding the destruction of mankind in movies like Colossus and Wargames. In general, computers have long since become too fast for blinkenlight displays to be of much use in debugging problems, but both movie makers and computer enthusiasts have had a hard time letting go of these iconic symbols of computer power—the Jurassic Park movie is a classic example their combined efforts, where a Connection Machine supercomputer ripples with red LED blinkenlights. The Connection Machine used tens of thousands of processors working in parallel, and ostensibly the red lights were used to check on the status of processors and run various diagnostics, but everyone in the business knew the lights were really just there to look awesome.

Who says science education is falling by the wayside? The Online Colleges Blog has compiled a list of the “15 Strangest College Courses in America.” And while the general list is pretty standard (yes, Virginia, there really is an underwater basket weaving class) a decent chunk of them are sci-fi related. The geek-friendly choices include Georgetown University’s  “Philosophy and Star Trek,” the University of California at Irvine’s “Science of Superheroes” (plenty of new material for that syllabus these days), “Myth and Science Fiction: Star Wars, The Matrix, and Lord of the Rings” at Centre College, UC Berkeley’s “The Strategy of StarCraft,” and our personal favorite, “Zombies in Popular Media” at Chicago’s Columbia College.

While it’s easy to laugh these off as “rocks for jocks”-level fluff, discounting sci-fi as an academic-worthy subject is a pretty big oversimplification. The best science fiction becomes so popular, and has such a lasting effect on culture, because it taps into underlying truths about humans, culture, and society.

Even now, current sci-fi mirrors just about every controversy we’ve got going, from the recent “Is Resident Evil 5 racist?” controversy to the religious fanaticism in BG. In fact, many sci-fi writers can get away with plotlines and characters that would never fly in a film or series set in the “real world” (reincarnation-obsessed Muslim fundamentalists as key characters? We think not. Attractive females in wading pools out to destroy humanity? No prob.) Plus there’s the fact that the best sci-fi spawns some pretty interesting work by big names in (real) science.

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Opening today is Monsters vs. Aliens, the latest digitally animated movie from Dreamworks. While you can see it in regular cinemas, Dreamworks is really hoping that people will flock to IMAX theaters to watch MvA in 3D. The movie was produced with the goal of riding the current 3D cinema wave in mind from the beginning.

In many previous “Made For 3D” efforts, this has resulted in a lot of gratuitous and self-conscious “Look Ma – Depth!” activity, with characters carefully moving to face the screen so they can throw an object or thrust a hand at the audience. Mercifully, there’s only one or two such incidents in MvA. For most of the movie, the 3D is in the service of the storytelling, not the other way around. In particular, the 3D is often used as way to easily establish scale—handy in a movie where giant alien robots square off against puny (and not so puny) Earthlings. The movie also has a lushness about its virtual sets, something which I think Dreamwork’s rival, Pixar, has had an edge on, at least until now.

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Michael D. asked, on the Assignment Desk post:

In the most recent issue of Nature, there are two papers…that detail the characteristics of sodium and lithium under extreme pressure. Specifically, these two metals adopt semiconductor-like (even superconductor-like) characteristics if you subject them to giga-pressure (literally, 80-200 gigapascals). The sodium actually becomes optically transparent during this squeeze. Reading this reminded me of a Star Trek [movie] that involved a not-so-scientific explanation of “transparent aluminum” …Is the idea of using transparent metal for windows pure science fiction?

The paper you’re talking about, the one on high pressure sodium, sure did make a lot of noise in the science world, and for good reason. Drs. Yanming Ma and Artem Oganov at SUNY Stonybrook showed that  lithium and sodium do goofy things under pressure — like turn transparent. Normally under really high pressure, elements turn into metals, c.f. hydrogen. The science makes intuitive sense because the atoms are getting smooshed together as the pressure increases. The electrons are freed to become conductors, and the element takes a metal-like structure. But in sodium, it turns out, the electrons line up into columns, one on top of the other. This creates gaps between the atoms, and instead of becoming a conductor, it becomes an insulator, and, conicidentally,  becomes transparent.

All of which is cool, but it doesn’t really answer Michael D’s question, because the sodium is under 200 gigapasacals of pressure, the sort of pressure you find if you were journeying from Jupiter’s surface toward its core, not hanging out on the bridge of the Enterprise.

And yet! That formula Scotty gave for transparent aluminum in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home very nearly exists in the form of aluminum oxynitride  (known as ALONtm). Harder than diamond, ALONtm is far more shock resistant than even bullet resistant glass. In Air Force tests it has resisted multiple rounds from a .50 caliber sniper rifle. That hardness also prevents wear and tear, since neither sand nor rocks nor shrapnel in the night will scratch the stuff.

In practical use, the ALONtm would be the outer layer for windscreens of cockpit covers. It would be backed by a thin layer of glass and a layer of transparent polymer to prevent shattering. All together the ALONtm windscreen would be thinner and lighter than a traditional bullet-resistant windscreen.What’s unclear from my research is whether it would be strong enough to hold back enough water to make the aquarium for all those humpbacks whales on a captured Klingon spaceship, but it’s a start.

The main downside? It’s wicked expensive. Traditional bullet resistant glass goes for $3 per inch-squared, but ALONtm costs between $10-$15, or it did back in 2005.  I can’t seem to find any more current applications for it, but this is the military, it could be classified.

Anyway Michael D., I hope that answers your question.

By now, every sci-fi devotee and his grandmother has sounded off on Watchmen, Zack Snyder’s big-budget big-hoopla film version of the eponymous graphic novel. Love it or hate it (and most fans seemed to do one or the other) we can all admit that the movie remained faithful to the book, minus a few scenes and the absence of [spoiler alert] one giant alien squid.

We’ll leave the debates over the acting, direction, and overall adaptation to others (except to say that Jackie Earle Haley stole the show). But one aspect worthy of analysis is the story’s main conflict—the constant “looming” nuclear holocaust. Granted, we never actually see any evidence that the aforementioned holocaust is looming, save a few shots of Nixon upping Defcon levels—but we’ll address that later. When Alan Moore first published the book in 1986, the apocalypse on everyone’s mind was Cold War atomic bombs—which, as we’ve noted, no longer pack quite the same anxiety punch as, say, biological weapons. Today, gas masks and duct tape have replaced air raids and backyard shelters in the popular conscious, to the point where seeing mushroom clouds onscreen feels like you’re watching an ’80s homage.

Of course, none of this means that the nuclear threat is any smaller now than it was three decades ago: The danger of nuclear war is still present, and fear of missile attack still drives plenty of policy and military tech decisions worldwide. But, like Bird Flu, nukes seem to have a PR problem: Despite the fact that they could wipe us all out, the thought of them isn’t all that scary.

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One of the best publishers in the space business, Apogee Books, has just come out with The Saucer Fleet, by Jack Hagerty and Jon Rogers. This book is a follow on to the authors’ well-regarded Spaceship Handbook, and focuses on the fictional armada of flying saucers that dominated comics, movies and television during the 50’s and 60’s.

With a foreword by DISCOVER’s very own Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, The Saucer Fleet dissects in great detail flying saucers from classic productions such as This Island Earth, Forbidden Planet and The Invaders, and looks at their impact on the audiences of the day. As well as a detailed synopses of the movie or show and extensive production notes giving the history and background of how each fictional saucer was brought to life, the authors also use frame-by-frame analyses to create engineering diagrams of saucer exteriors and interiors (often struggling with the fact that the interior set designers didn’t care overly much about matching up with the scale shown by the exterior models.) Dedicated model-builders can use these diagrams to build their own reproductions, but any science-fiction fan will get a kick out of seeing how much thought and effort went into designing these deceptively simple spacecraft that once thrilled or terrified audiences.

After too long a wait, the second season of Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager has arrived. Chad Vader chronicles the life of Darth Vader’s somewhat less successful brother, Chad, and his job at a local supermarket. (You can get caught up with season one starting here.) Each episode is only a few minutes long, but lays on the funny, even for the most casual of Star Wars fans. The new season kicks off with Chad’s supermarket (called Empire Market, naturally enough) being bought out by a large corporation, and Chad’s desire to successfully demonstrate the most powerful laser checkout system in the galaxy.

There’s a lot going on in January for science fiction fans—the start of the last ten episodes of Battlestar Galactica, the series finale of Stargate Atlantis*, the release of Outlander (which is either going to be embarrassingly bad or Totally Awesome) and more. Io9 has put together a handy day-by-day breakdown of January so you can buy your movie tickets, set your DVR, and get in line at the comic-book store at the right time.

*The nice people at SciFi sent me a screener of the last two episodes, and I can tell you now the penultimate episode of Stargate Atlantis on January 2nd is one of their cleverest ever in terms of storytelling.

SciFi Wire bring us the news that The Terminator, the founding entry in one of the most successful and influential science-fiction franchises ever, has been added to the U.S. Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, which preserves movies deemed to be particularly noteworthy in the national archives. As well as the script and iconic performance by Schwarzenegger, the Library’s citation also singled out the synthesizer-based soundtrack for praise.

Our ultimate pick for this week is the only movie to have a DNA sequence for a title: Gattaca. An all-too-believable future has divided the world into the genetic haves and have-nots. One of the have-nots sets out to fulfill his dream of traveling into space, proving that DNA is not your destiny. Ethan Hawke, Jude Law, and Uma Thurman all turn in perfectly calibrated performances in this cautionary tale of man who leases another’s genetic identity.

Okay, so today’s pick is not exactly festive fare, but 28 Days Later does celebrate the importance of family along the way, and it even has some christmas lights in it! We mentioned this movie recently in Science Not Fiction’s list of the 10 Best Post-Apocalypses: not only is it a great movie in itself, but it also breathed new life into the Zombie Apocalypse sub genre. A small handful of survivors find themselves alone in a world in which nearly everyone else has been turned into a de facto zombie by a virus in this gripping film.

People seem to either like or loath The Fifth Element, but the alien opera singer’s performance scene alone was enough to win me over. Lavish visuals and entertaining performances from Bruce Willis, Milla Jovovich, and Gary Oldman make this movie worth watching.

Today at #4 is John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of The Thing, one of the few times a remake has turned out markedly better than the original film, in this case 1951’s The Thing From Another World. A group of isolated scientists at an Antarctic research base struggle with a shapeshifting and hostile alien that had lain frozen in the ice for countless millennia. The special effects were groundbreaking for their time, but they do not overwhelm the plotting as Carpenter inexorably ratchets up the tension.

With most of our favorite shows on hiatus until the new year, science-fiction fans need to find some other way to get their fix. Fortunately, this year we have Hulu and it’s admittedly pretty slick streaming technology that means anyone with a reasonably fast Internet connection and web browser can watch video on demand without any fuss. Science Not Fiction looked through Hulu’s science fiction catalog and came up with their five best movies. We’ll be featuring one per day till the end of the week.

First up is Ghostbusters, which married high-tech gadgets with the supernatural. Rooted firmly in the science-fiction and horror tradition of H.P. Lovecraft but executed with deadpan humor, this movie was a real original that has held up surprisingly well.

Opening today is the remake of the 1951 science-fiction classic, The Day The Earth Stood Still, starring Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly and directed by Scott Derrickson (who Science Not Fiction interviewed earlier this week). In the original movie, Klaatu came to inform the Earth that the galactic community was Not Happy about the stockpile of nuclear weapons humanity was building up. This time around, it’s the erosion of planetary biodiversity that has our alien neighbors ticked off. It’s actually not an unreasonable motivation — many astrobiologists suspect that bacterial life may be somewhat common in our galaxy; even in our own solar system there are several possible habitats, including Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa. But they have speculated that more advanced lifeforms are exceedingly rare: consider that for 85 per cent of the 4 billion years life has existed on Earth, no multicellular creatures arose. So the rapid extinction of many species here would be a significant blow to the biodiversity of the entire galaxy, not just the Earth’s.

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